A SONG IN THE MORNING

by Gerald Seymour

  The civil servant had parried. "The decision has been taken, but the decision is not yet public."

  Could the solicitor's client know of the decision of the State President?

  "He'll know when he needs to know."

  Surely, if he was going to get clemency then he should be told immediately?

  "If he's not going to get clemency then he's better not knowing."

  Couldn't the solicitor be given an indication of the State President's thinking?

  "Look, I'm not going to tell you what is the State President's opinion. The way we do it is this, the deputy sheriff will go to the gaol not more than four or five days before an execution and he will then inform a prisoner that the appeal to the State President has been turned down. I'm not saying for certain that the sentence will stand in the case of your client, but I can tell you that if it does stand you will know at the same time that Carew knows."

  It had been spelled out to him. The young solicitor softened.

  "Not for Carew, but for me to know."

  "You're asking me to read the mind of the State President."

  "A bit of guidance."

  "The minister was in Petrusburg this morning. He made an addition to his prepared speech. He said . . . 'There are people who say that your government is soft on the matter of law and order. We are not. There are people who say that our legal processes can be influenced by the threats of foreign governments. They can not. There are people who say that terrorists will get away with murder in our fine country.

  They will not. I warn people who seek to bring down our society that they will face the harshest penalties under our law, whether they be White or Black, whether they be our citizens or jackals from outside.' . . . It's not me that's answering your questions, it is my minister."

  "How long?"

  "Not long, not a month."

  "It's cut and dried?"

  "Listen. At the moment we have a police strength of around 45,000. In ten years we will have a force of more than 80,000. Right now we have to fight this unrest with an understrength force. If any South African police line cracks then there is nothing to save us from anarchy. We have to sustain the morale of the police or we go under, and supporting the morale is not best served by reprieving police murderers."

  "I appreciate that you've spoken to me in confidence.

  What can save my client?"

  The civil servant examined the file in front of him. He was a long time turning the pages. He looked up, he gazed steadily at the solicitor.

  "If at this late stage your client were to give to the security police every detail of his knowledge of the African National Congress, then there might be grounds for clemency in his case alone."

  "The others would go?"

  "We could handle one reprieve, not more. We have never understood why your client ever involved himself in terrorism, and he hasn't helped us. If we had names, safe houses, arms caches, everything he knew, then we could talk about clemency."

  "Guaranteed?"

  Fractionally the eyebrows of the civil servant lifted.

  "You should tell him to talk to the security police, that's all that can save him."

  • * •

  Sergeant Oosthuizen stood by the locked door of the exercise yard and talked. He talked of his daughter who was big in wind-surfing down on the Cape, and of his son who owned a liquor store in Louis Trichardt.

  Sergeant Oosthuizen had been 38 years in the prison service, the last eleven of them in Beverly Hills. He was to retire in the next month, and then he'd be able to spend time with his daughter and his son. Sergeant Oosthuizen didn't require Jeez to have a conversation with him. He just talked, that was what he was happiest at.

  It was more of a garden than an exercise yard. Against the walls was concrete paving. Each wall was nine paces long.

  Thirty-six paces for a circuit. Forty-nine circuits was a mile's walk. The centre of the yard was Jeez's garden. The soil was twelve inches deep, then concrete. It was Jeez's garden because none of the other condemns showed any interest in it. The garden had not been looked after since a child killer had gone to the rope the month before Jeez arrived at Beverly Hills. Last spring Oosthuizen had brought Jeez seed. The geraniums had done well, the marigolds had threatened to take over, the chrysanthemums had failed. Jeez crouched on his haunches and picked discoloured leaves and old blooms off the geraniums. The sunlight was latticed over the bed and the concrete by the shadow of the grid above him. The garden was a cell. The song birds could manage it through the grid and out again, but nothing as large as a pigeon could have squeezed down to feed from the grubs that he turned up when he weeded his flowers.

  In the exercise yard Jeez could see the sky and he could feel a trapped slow breath of wind, but he could see no trees, and no buildings, and no men other than Sergeant Oosthuizan and sometimes the guard at his catwalk window.

  He could see the wall of C section 2, and the outer wall, and the wall of C section 3, and the wall of the C section corridor.

  If he stod with his back to the wall of C section 2 and raised himself onto tip-toe he could look over the roof of C section

  & onto the upper brickwork of the hanging room.

  He wondered if Sergeant Oosthuizen would have retired before it was his turn, Jeez's turn, to take the early walk.

  He wondered if the sergeant would walk with him.

  Tha was stupid thinking, because there was no way the team would let it happen. Burning the candle they'd be.

  Couldn't for the life of him think how the team would pull him out. Thought about it often enough, but couldn't work it. Colonel Basil wasn't the one for ideas, nor Lennie. Adrian was good with ideas, better than Henry. Have to be Adrian who was going to crack it, and then the team would all thrash it round. Wouldn't see their feet for dust once they'd settled on an idea. Clear memories, faces clear in his mind, Colonel Basil, and Lennie who had the limp from the ambush in Cyprus, and Adrian who'd bloody near lost his career in the gentlemen's toilet at Piccadilly underground, and Henry

  . . Shit, and wouldn't Henry have been up for retirement, gone to breed the bloody pigeons he always talked of. What if they'd all gone? Couldn't have done . . . All bloody older than Jeez. Colonel Basil was, certain, Henry was. Bloody Lennie looked older. Couldn't tell Adrian's age, not with the hair rinse. What if they weren't there at Century . . .? Stupid thinking. No way the team would let him hang . . .

  "Carew, I'm speaking to you."

  Jeez started up. "Sorry, Sergeant."

  "You weren't listening to me."

  "Sorry, Sergeant, I was far away."

  "You don't want to brood, you know. It's where we're all going. You don't want to think too much."

  "No, Sergeant."

  "Why I was talking to you was that I'd just seen your fingers, first and second on your right hand. How long is it since I've been with you?"

  "It's thirteen months, Sergeant."

  "And I've never noticed your fingers before."

  "Just fingers, Sergeant."

  "I've never noticed them before, and my wife says I'm the noticing kind."

  "What didn't you notice, Sergeant?"

  "No nails on the first and second fingers of your right hand."

  Jeez looked down. Pink skin had grown over the old scars.

  "Someone took them out, Sergeant."

  "Ingrowing, were they? I once had an ingrowing big toe nail, when I was serving at the old Johannesburg Fort gaol.

  That's closed now. They thought they might have to take it off, but they cut it back and it grew again, but not in. Hell's painful."

  "Someone took them out for fun, Sergeant. Can we go inside now, please, Sergeant."

  "Who took them out for fun . . . That's a very serious allegation . . . "

  "Long ago, Sergeant, long before South Africa."

  He could remember the pliers grasping at the nails of the first and second fingers of his right hand. Pain rivers in his whole body. He could remember the smile
of the bastard as he jerked the nails off. He hadn't talked to the bastard who had ripped his nails off, just as he hadn't talked to the security police in Johannesburg.

  "And you get yourself washed up for the medic."

  They went inside. Jeez going first and Sergeant Oosthuizen following and locking the door to the exercise yard.

  The doctor saw Jeez once a week, and weighed him. Jeez knew why he was weighed each week.

  Sergeant Oosthuizen stood by the door of Jeez's cell.

  "That must have hurt when they took them out."

  "A long time ago, Sergeant."

  5

  Hilda Perry liked to see her family on its way in the morning.

  Sam had taken Will to school, and ten minutes later she was back at the front door holding Jack's raincoat ready for him. He came hurrying down the stairs. If he ever managed to get himself married or get a flat of his own, she'd truly miss him. She always thought it was because of the time they had been together, the abandoned wife and the father-less son, that they had a special bond . . . He wasn't sleeping properly, she could see the eye bags. She reckoned she looked the same.

  Today she hugged her boy. She knew they were both thinking of the man half way round the world from them in a cell, thinking of the man she wouldn't have recognised, her Jack couldn't have remembered. He told her he would be home early, he would have seen her gratitude. They'd keep a sort of vigil in the house, the two of them, for however many days and weeks it took, until Jeez was . . . Just the two of them. Sam didn't know, but she'd started to take Librium three days earlier, just one tablet each night when she was getting into bed, so that she wouldn't dream. She shrugged him into his raincoat. He managed a smile for her, and was away down the front path to his car. The telephone rang behind her. She wanted to see Jack go before answering the telephone, but he had taken a chammy out of his car and was cleaning the windscreen. She went back into the hall and lifted the telephone.

  "Could I speak to Mr Curwen, please?"

  She could see Jack at the rear window, finishing off.

  "Who is it?"

  "Name's Jimmy Sandham. He'd want to speak to me."

  She ran awkwardly in her slippers down the path. The engine was starting, coughing. She caught him just in time.

  She saw the frown. She heard him say, "I'll be right with you."

  He put the telephone down.

  "Only work, Mum."

  She knew when he lied. She had always known. He was away, running down the path. She thought she was losing him. Could no longer reach him in the way she had before.

  He had changed when he had broken with that nice Miriam.

  She knew what had happened from Miriam's mother when a rain squall had driven them off the course into the lounge of the golf club. Something methodical and cheerless about his life. Two nights a week, after work, at the squash courts, working himself out until he was near sick from exhaustion

  . . . and the same with his studies again, picking up the lost degree course, working late into the nights. She preferred him the way he had been before, when he was with Miriam.

  She could never understand how he had lost the degree chance, thrown it up four months from his finals, seemed ridiculous to her, and so trivial.

  She watched him drive away.

  He had been so matter of fact that evening. He had come home from college and told her that his university days were finished. He'd told her the circumstances, like they didn't matter. A single student who was a paid-up member of a Fascist party being heckled by a group of Trotskyites between chemical engineering and applied mathematics. A point of principle, he'd said flatly, didn't like bullies. He'd told the Trots to leave it, they hadn't and they'd jostled the lad and were spitting in his face. Remembered Jack remarking that he'd thrown a punch, broken a boy's jaw.

  So matter of fact. Jack spelling it out that he had been up before the disciplinary court of the senate that morning, and the provost had asked him for an apology, and his reply that he would do it again, because it was bullying, and being told that he must give the assurance, and refusing, and being told that he'd have to leave, and leaving. Telling it like it wasn't important, telling it just like Jeez would have. And here he was, back at his books.

  She closed the door. She was alone with herself. The Librium didn't last into the morning. She worked at speed with the hoover and the dusters and the brush and pan, upstairs round the beds and downstairs through the kitchen.

  The front door bell rang.

  It was a cosy and predictable household. It was her home that was being damaged by nightmares and sedation pills and lies. The doorbell rang again. She didn't want to answer it, she didn't even want to go to the door and peer through the spy hole. Another long ringing. The milkman had already been, the post was on the sideboard in the hall beside the telephone, the newspaper was on the kitchen table. She looked through the fish eye spy hole. It was a tall man, still short of middle age she thought, and he wore a light grey suit and his face was tanned and his moustache was clipped short into a crescent over his upper lip. She tightened the belt on her housecoat. The door chain was hanging loose, unfastened.

  She opened the door.

  The man was smiling.

  "Mrs Perry? Mrs Hilda Perry?" A soft casual voice.

  "Yes."

  "Did you used to live, Mrs Perry, at 45 Green Walk, Coulsdon, in Surrey?" Another smile. She couldn't place the accent. There was a lilt in his speech that wasn't English.

  "Yes."

  "Could I come inside, please, Mrs Perry?"

  "I don't buy anything at the front door."

  "It's about a letter you had, Mrs Perry."

  "What letter?"

  "You had a letter from a Mr James Carew in Pretoria Central prison. My name's Swart, it would be easier to talk inside."

  She recognised the accent as South African. "What if I did have such a letter?"

  "I'm from the embassy, consular section. The letter Mr Carew wrote to you is the only letter he's written to anyone inside or outside our country. We're trying to help Mr Carew. Sometimes a man's background, his personal history, can help a prisoner in his situation. It would be better if I was inside."

  Because Jack had lied to her that morning she was fine tuned to a lie. She knew this man lied. The man was taller than her even though he stood on the step below the front door.

  "If you could help us with Mr Carew's background, his friends and his work and so on, then there might be something you told us that could make a difference to his situation."

  Whatever he said he smiled. She wondered if he had been on a course to learn how to smile. She knew Jeez's letter word by word. Each guarded sentence was in her mind. Jeez didn't want them to know that Hilda Perry was his wife, that Jack was his son.

  "I've nothing to say to you."

  "I don't think you understand me, Mrs Perry. James Carew is going to hang. What I'm trying to do is to find out something that might lead to a reprieve."

  His foot was in the doorway. Jeez wouldn't have wanted him in her house, she was sure of that.

  "I just want you to go away."

  The smile oiled across his face, and then he was inside the hall.

  "Why don't we just sit down and talk, Mrs Perry, with a cup of tea."

  She thought of the good years with Jeez, and the misery without him. She thought of the way she had willed herself to hate him after he had gone. She would have sworn that the man who had pushed himself into her home was Jeez's enemy.

  She picked up the telephone. She dialled fast.

  "Who are you ringing?"

  "Police, please," she said into the telephone.

  "That's a hell of a stupid thing to be doing."

  "Mrs Hilda Perry, I've an intruder in my house - 45

  Churchill Close."

  "Are you trying to put a rope round his neck?"

  "Please come straight away."

  She put the telephone down. She turned to face him.

  "T
hey're very good round here, very quick. Why don't you come into the kitchen and sit down, and then you can explain to the officer who you are and what you want."

  Cold anger, no smile. "He'll hang, Mrs Perry."

  He was gone through the door. She saw him trotting down the path. When he was outside the garden he started to run.

  Years of placid and sedate domestic life were disintegrating. For a long, long time she had loathed Jeez. For the last few short days she could remember only the times that she had loved him.

  • • •

  By the time the police car turned into Churchill Close, Major Hannes Swart was two miles away, going fast and fuming.

  It had taken him long enough to track Hilda Perry from the address used by the prisoner, Carew. Some good, honest footslogging had translated Green Walk into Churchill Close, and for nothing. Swart had been in the South African police for seventeen years, but he hadn't done footslogging for more than a dozen. Security police officers were too precious to have their time wasted on door-to-door and scene-of-crime.

  For some of his work he was a businessman promoting in the United Kingdom the sale of Stellenbosch wines. At other times he was an accredited journalist at the Foreign Press Association specialising in financial affairs. Most often he was a lowly member of the visa section of the embassy's consular staff. He worked to a police brigadier from the fifth floor of the embassy. He was one of the bright stars amongst the detail of security police officers assigned abroad. He had blown what ought to have been a simple task. A dowdy housewife had seen him off.

  By the time a bemused police officer was leaving Churchill Close, having been told only that a South African male had tried to force entry into the house, no explanations of why, the temper of Major Swart had matured to controlled fury.

  They should have jazzed the swine, used the helicopter on him, and the electrics when they had him in John Vorster Square. Too damn correct they had been with him in the interrogation cells.

  And a hell of a damn good thing that he had taken the precaution of parking his car out of Churchill Close. At least the cow didn't have the number plate to add to whatever bloody story she hatched to the local force.